From: "Gary McGovern" <gary.play at btopenworld.com>
> No disrespect to you personally Duane, but I remember a similar discussion
at Easter last
> year and Dan Ingalls proposed a system of updating the commenting. That
seemed to go
> ignored. It seems that once in a while there is a lot of hot air about
documentation and
> nothing gets done.
>
> It would be good if no classes were accepted into the image until they
were documented.
>
> A lesson is to be learned that scholars are still trying to find out how
the pyramids of
> Egypt were built. ;-).

One difference, I hope, is that I'm offering to actually *do* something
concrete, including commitment of systems and bandwidth, and that work
enables people to have to exert substantially less effort to improve the
documentation of system.  If everyone thinks it's a pointless exercise, I
won't bother.  I've intentionally crafted this proposal to be modest instead
of trying to solve the entire documentation problem - if it doesn't lower
the barrier sufficiently, then please let me know.

Frankly, what really makes the idea work is that the browser be reconfigured
to make it trivially easy, indeed encouraging, for people to contribute to
the database.  Most previous documentation ideas (Swikis, etc) have been
very poorly integrated, and I think that's a big part the problem - Les has
discussed this issue with regard to class comments in another thread.

I certainly don't think it's a magic bullet.

-- Duane